At L.A.’s Disney Hall, Paul Simon’s Triumphant Comeback Tour Proves Quietly Unretiring Was the Right Move: Concert Review

Here comes rhymin’ Simon. It’s not a phrase we would have imagined saying again, in the context of a concert tour, after Paul Simon wrapped up his official farewell tour seven years ago. There was reason to believe he had valid reasons for marking that as his real goodbye to road shows, and not as the kind of fake-out retirement that so many performers cash in on and then renege on. But he has found solutions to the issues that might have kept him off-stage. By the time he kicked off a five-night stand at Walt Disney Concert Hall this week, Simon was a full 40 shows into his 2025 “Quiet Celebration” outing. And he was sounding… yes, softer (as promised in the tour title!) but, really, undiminished. We’ve never had a better reason to be glad someone went back on their word.

You might look at the “A Quiet Celebration Tour” moniker and ask, as your first question: Well, how much quieter? And the answer is: not terribly much. You shouldn’t mistake this for an all-acoustic tour, although that’s the tone that is taken prior to the show’s intermission, when Simon and his band play back his most recent album, 2023’s “Seven Psalms,” in its front-to-back, suite-style entirety, mostly solemn and without much in the way of tempo or electricity. But then, in the second act and encores, you get 15 catalog selections, including some tunes that count as rabble-rousers by Simon standards. The evening does turns into a party, despite his best intentions to keep it down.

There’s a subtlety to what makes this tour so successful that really does have something to do with volume, or the appearance of it. Simon has as many as 11 players on stage at a time, and during the classics, they’re all playing more or less the same very busy parts they would have played before, on a “Graceland” or a “Cool, Cool River” or even a “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Yet the arrangements have been calibrated so that the loudest songs seem ever-so-slightly dialed down, almost imperceptibly, to match what might be a little different for the frontman this time around. Any sense of that won’t come as a complete surprise to the audience, because Simon has been open about his hearing issues, stating that only through an elaborate, advanced system of stage monitors has he felt like he could reasonably tour again. There’s also the matter of his voice, which is a little bit softer with age. It’s as if everything has been finely tuned to allow Simon to act his age (which is 83), without doing any kind of stinting on the rich and able-bodied performances.

The performance of “Seven Psalms” is referred to by Simon as “the first half,” although, by actual volume, it’s well under that. It’s safe to guess that most of the audience comes in being unfamiliar with the record, and this is where the booking of fine-arts joints like Disney Hall comes in handy, as even attendees who haven’t come to see the symphony there can still pretty easily intuit that the venue lends itself to a kind of hush and some focused attention skills. The folky “Seven Psalms” exists pretty much at the meditative, impressionistic and spiritual end of his spectrum — with the exception of “My Professional Opinion,” which comes in the middle of the suite and lands with a playful blues feel. It has Simon grappling with the concept of God and exploring unreconciled relationships in the later chapters of life, and it’s not easily graspable on first listen. But maybe the performances on this tour are inspiring a lot more people to check out one of 2023’s most unfairly overlooked albums, one that has exactly the ambition and personal meaning you’d hope for from a great artist who has no desire to go into that good night coasting.

The seven song titles from this album helpfully appeared on an overhead screen as their number came up, to offer an indication of transition without anything as gauche as actually pausing the music for applause. But the album is really more than seven numbers, since the opening song, “The Lord,” gets several unbilled reprises as the suite courses along. That song alone, in its many iterations, counts as a major latter-day Simon work, as he ponders every possible way of looking at the Lord, from shepherd to wrecking ball, incorporating both the most Christian and the most irreverent possible imagery. By the time he’s sung through it all, you won’t exactly know whether the singer is a believer or hardened skeptic, but you’ll know that Simon, the mystical poet and baseball nut, has covered all bases.

His wife, Edie Brickell, came out to guest on the song cycle’s final two parts, “The Sacred Harp” and “Wait,” as she apparently does every night on the tour. She stands on the opposite side of the stage from Simon, to sing her parts, but in musical spirit, at least, they’re as close as the two owls perched together on the “Seven Psalms” album cover. A concept album that starts out being all about God finally ends on something more knowable in this life — the bonding with another human being — and when they sing “Amen” in harmony to end the cycle, it feels like it has to do with Simon facing eternity and with putting a divine seal on his and Brickell’s enduring love affair.

And then the longer second “half” rewards fans for any patience with that opening with a set that hits all the Simon fandom pleasure centers. He hits almost al the obvious greatest hits (albeit no “Bridge Over Troubled Water” or “You Can Call Me Al”) and finds a few deeper cuts (like “St. Judy’s Comet,” a 50-year-old track from “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” that’d apparently been performed not even a dozen times prior to this tour).

The band got a lot more workout on some of these oldies than on the more minimalist and hypnotic “Seven Psalms” material. The presence of two veteran sidemen in Simon’s cast made for especially memorable and even touching moments. The bass player, Bakithi Kumalo, was introduced as the last surviving member of Simon’s original South African “Graceland” band, and his link to the frontman’s (arguably) most essential era was invaluable with some fleeting signature vocalizations. Meanwhile, Steve Gadd, one of three drummers or percussionists in the ensemble, was back in the fold from the early ’70s to play what could count as pop music’s most famous snare drum part, on the encore of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And if that isn’t worth the price of admission…

Horns and strings had their place — mostly the latter, with viola player Caleb Burhans and cellist Eugene Friesen managing to sound like nearly a full Kronos Quartet up there at times. (Friesen’s instrumental entwining with Simon’s acoustic guitar during a stripped-down portion of “Slip Slidin’ Away” was a lovely example.) Nothing was too radically rearranged, although you could notice that “Homeward Bound” had been subtly transformed into more of a country song, between the train-like sound of brushes on drums and Mick Rossi’s lilting piano line.

The screen in this half was used for the occasional photo illustration instead of the previous act’s song titles: If you ever wanted to see the actual photo that inspired “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” there you had it. And “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” which had an unusually expansive spoken intro by Simon, climaxed with the sight of Johnny Ace, JFK and John Lennon side by side on the big screen, each of them with “Johnny Ace” as the caption under his name.

Brickell made a return appearance, entering from the wings to contribute a whistling solo to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” On this song, which served as climax to the main set, it was like the evening had been the concert equivalent of “Benjamin Button” — beginning with Simon in his advanced years looking into the great beyond, and ending with him as a schoolboy.

But the denouement grew somber again, with Simon finally alone on stage with just his acoustic guitar for company, bringing things back to an origin point in a different way with a closing rendition of “The Sound of Silence.” Just as we were all born in dust and to dust we shall return, so it is with silence, maybe for any of us, but especially for a Paul Simon who (along with Garfunkel) had that existential hymn as his fluky first No. 1 smash 60 years ago.

To return to a burning question, or at least one that was on the minds of fans before this tour started: What is the sound of Simon right now — his singing voice, particularly? When he appeared on the “SNL 50” special recently, there was some alarm that he did not sound as youthful as, well, his duet partner Sabrina Carpenter. Or, to give the scoffers more credit, as robust as he did even on his earlier 21st century tours, pre-retirement. The answer to that should be a reassuring one, for anyone who hasn’t yet caught the tour and is thinking about scoring a resale ticket before it’s all over. The best way to describe it is that, for maybe the first 60 seconds of the show, you may be struck by how Simon’s voice sounds a bit more fragile, at this age… and then after that brief period of adjustment, you forget about it. It’s rare to notice many high notes that has been scaled down for age, and you never have to worry about him missing any notes. (And he didn’t sound any worse the wear for just having had the back surgery for acute pain that forced him to cancel a couple earlier shows… the only reference to having been under the knife being an acknowledgement at the top of the show that he’d had “the craziest week.”)

So, in other words, in the best way, he sounds like an 83-year-old choirboy. How fortunate are we to unexpectedly get to share his sanctuary again?

Setlist for Paul Simon at Walt Disney Concert Hall, July 9, 2025:

Set 1: Seven Psalms
“The Lord”
“Love Is Like a Braid”
“My Professional Opinion”
“Your Forgiveness”
“Trail of Volcanoes”
“The Sacred Harp”
“Wait”

Set 2:
“Graceland”
“Slip Slidin’ Away”
“Train in the Distance”
“Homeward Bound”
“The Late Great Johnny Ace”
“St. Judy’s Comet”
“Under African Skies”
“Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War”
“Rewrite”
“Spirit Voices”
“The Cool, Cool River”
“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”

Encores:
“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”
“The Boxer”
“The Sound of Silence”

The remaining dates on Paul Simon’s 2025 tour:
July 12 Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA 
July 14 Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA 
July 16 Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA 
 July 19 Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA
July 21 Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA
July 22 Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA
 July 25 The Orpheum, Vancouver BC 
July 26 The Orpheum, Vancouver BC 
July 28 The Orpheum, Vancouver BC 
 July 31  Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA
August 2 Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA
August 3  Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA